"Come on, play leap-frog," I invited. She hesitated, gave a run at me,
put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck. We
collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.
Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.
"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."
We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog
out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.
"--wonder if he saw us?"
"--perhaps--but what matter if he did?"
"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an
undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."
We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches
of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics
bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.
We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness
... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.
"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."
"And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you,
Hildreth?" It was the first time I had called her by her first name.
"Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself
don't know, yet I'm a woman."
I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp
of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a
perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.
It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.
"Wait," she bade playfully, "I'll bet I can make you rub your lips
again."
"No, you can't."
"Hold still!" she leaned toward me; I could look down into her bosom.
She just touched my lips with her forefinger.
"Now!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
"--think you've tickled me, do you?"
"--just wait!"
I forgot myself. My lips tickled and I rubbed them with the length of a
finger ... Hildreth laughed....
"Hildreth!"